Progressive Liberalism is a Mental Dissorder (merged)

[Skybird]

August,

Hui Neng was no barbar and no vandal, nor was he a conqueroir destroying other cultures by burnign their museums. what he is said to have done there, means that he iullustrated in a drastic way that if monks in the monastery wanted to become "enlightened", they had to give up the false belive that there is sometbign that could be gained, could be acchieved by doing the right procedures, or writing smart clever little theories about the nature of things and the meaning of life or to just trust and put blind faith into written scriptures.

Zen and Chna love to act by example, and they usually dispise long teahcings in words and writings. A simple act says so much more than a thousand words.

In Chan, which is the original China-based root of the tradition that later reached Japan and there turned into what today is called Zen, there is a strong mistrust against written delivery of traditions, because the intellectual as well as cognitive condensate - what together we call thinking - is organised in patterns and runs in structures that are not free, but gets heavily influenced by culture, education, envrionment input. Different body language and digfferent facial expression and mim ics as well as differing abilities to realise and correctly interprete these, for example is one consequence from these differences. Anbother is the totally different structure of languages - you cannot linearly translate Chinese into western languges like you tr alsate German into English.

Next, In Chan, enlightenment is seen as something that comes in total only, not in small quantities. It is a sudden, total experience sometimes described as a breaking-through. when the time is ripe and a student ios close to it, it was not rare that the master picked radical measures to make him jumpingk, running, falling, crawling over the last meter towards thwe "goal". The used their whip. The slapped them in the face. They yelled at them in sudden surporise. They kicked them, or threw them out of a window or down a shallow hill - whatever they saw fit. See it as a final slam of the fist on the table to wake up the student and make him suddenly aware.

Why isa this acceptable, you ask. Because, in this lkife, everything is uncertain and we cannot be sure of anything. Death is all alrund and can reach for us just any molmnent. There is no time to waste. To reach realisation of oneself, as enlightenment sometimes is described, is the only thing that counts. I the face of omnipresent death and the fact that all we do and acchieve is doomed to fail, apart again and to have been in vain, nothing else counts. Mediation, enlightenment - that is an issue of life and death. That sounds pathetic, but it is the simple truth. I would even go one step further and say: it is not about meditating, but about dying. And what has to die, is the illusion of what we call our ego.

What to you appears to be as an act of lacking civilisation (in case of China!?), of barbary and vandalism, in fact was an act of great love and affection, of deep insight, dedication and determination. What Hui Neng said when he destroyed the scrolls, was this: don'T accept bullsh!t, don't waste time, come to your senses and focus with all your power on what really counts. He also showed that way that any attempt to explain and to form theories and models about enlgithenment, must fail due to the limits of human language - and it is a neurophysical fact that our intellectual thinking runs along the schemes established by the structures of the languages we speak. Language patterns decide on thinking patterns, and vice versa. Since both are limited, they cannot form a correct image of the unlimited. Every verbal hint on what enlightenment is, necessarily must be misleading for that reason.

You cannot say in words what "it" is. You can only say in words what "it" is not. So, throw away the darkness of all blind conceptions and terms and labels. Free yourself of everything.